The Europeans: Photographs by Tina Barney

BARNEY, Tina, FORRESTA, Merry, SHEFFIELD, Graham

ISBN 10: 3865210953 / ISBN 13: 9783865210951

Published by Steidl and the Barbican Art Gallery, London, Göttingen, Germany, 2005

About this Item

First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Yellow paper-covered boards with title stamped in red on cover and spine, with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs and afterword by Tina Barney. Foreword by Graham Sheffield. Essay by Merry Forresta. Design by Steidl Design. 192 pp., with 83 four-color plates beautifully printed on fine matte paper by Steidl from scans made in Steidl's digital darkroom. 9-3/4 x 12 inches. Published on the occasion of the 2005 exhibition The Europeans: Photographs by Tina Barney, at London's Barbican Art Gallery. Out of print. Scarce. New in New dust jacket. From the publisher: "'For almost thirty years Tina Barney has constructed a critique of patrician otherness in photographs made in rambling New England beach houses and New York apartments. Now, in her series The Europeans, we're off on a twenty-first century version of the Grand Tour. From Austria (1996) and Italy (1996-1998) to England (2001), France (2002), Spain (2003), and Germany (2004). Barney has confirmed a New World fantasy: that (even if your vantage point starts out high) the Old World rich live differently from you and me.' (Merry Forresta) Tina Barney's photographs portray relationships and at the same time invoke theatrical role-play reminiscent of nineteenth century portraiture. Each is a staged re-enactment of a prior moment and their power rests on their emphasis on often quixotic and ultimately human and mundane details. These photographic moments undermine the traditional relationship of subject to viewer and elide the status of portraits of the classes who would traditionally have commissioned painted family portraits.". Seller Inventory # 105917

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Europeans: Photographs by Tina Barney

Publisher: Steidl and the Barbican Art Gallery, London, Göttingen, Germany

Publication Date: 2005

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: New

Dust Jacket Condition: New

Edition: 1st Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

The social class that Tina Barney photographs might well be called the flaky upper crust. Originally part of that culture herself, Barney started out making pictures of her own tony family, then other American Eastern seaboard swells, and now she turns her lens on a Grand Tour of European grand dames and hommes. Theatrically posed, but catching the intruding serendipitous gesture, her pictures are at once distant and intimately funny, Olympian and down-to-earth, imperious and impetuous. A young man in gold-bedecked bullfighting regalia poses before a sumptuous curtain, his hauteur faintly ridiculous outside of the bullring. A French father leans a little too hard on an heirloom chair, while his son beside him seems to wipe his nose in a decidedly undignified way.

About the Author:

Tina Barney was born in New York City in 1945. She began collecting photographs in 1971, and soon moved behind the camera herself. Her works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Yale University Art Gallery. In 1999, the Columbus Museum of Art organized a traveling retrospective of her work.